Online advertising is an important source of revenue for enterprises engaged in electronic commerce. A number of different kinds of page-based online advertisements are currently in use, along with various associated distribution requirements, advertising metrics, and pricing mechanisms. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a page to be configured to contain a location for inclusion of an advertisement. An advertisement can be selected for display each time the page is requested, for example, by a browser or server application.
Advertisers in all forms of media attempt to target the advertisements to the audience. For example, television commercials during a football game tend to target males. Likewise, online advertisers look for ways to target their advertisements to particular users. Advertisements may be targeted based on the content of the page, such as ads targeted to males on a football related website. Another way online advertisers provide targeted advertisements is through behavior tracking based on a behavioral profile. For example, a user who views financial websites and data frequently may be targeted for advertisements related to finance or banking. In order to be most effective, the behavioral tracking should be accurate, thorough, and accessible via different domains and/or websites. A behavioral profile generated by one domain should be accessible by another domain. In order to transfer the behavioral profile across domains, a user identification is transferred which may implicate security related issues, e.g. passing personally identifiable information across unsecured domains. In addition, domains may access one another's databases which results in duplicate infrastructure and increased hardware/operation costs.
The transfer of a behavioral profile should avoid passing any personal information to ensure user privacy. In addition, the more data that is available, the more accurate the targeted advertisements will be. Accordingly, it may be beneficial to share behavioral targeting data anonymously between websites to develop a comprehensive and accurate behavior tracking profile for online users without sacrificing user privacy.